Ever wanted to be in charge? Well, in my own little world I will be, one day. Just not quite yet. I'm a bit tired at the moment... maybe I'll take over after I've had my little nap.
The United Dingdom - stating the bleeding obvious so you don't have to.
(Sign up to get updates direct to email or follow @Battsby on Twitter)

Pages

Saturday, 22 October 2016

Banging on...

The press is full to bursting with precious,
self-fulfilling depictions of hate. All around us, Britain has ‘suddenly’ become
a terrifying place to live. Brexit is to blame, they say, because until June 23rd
2016 Britain was ‘the most tolerant society on Earth’, welcoming with open arms
the glorious diversity of multiculturalism. Then, overnight, the brownshirts
took over, looting Jewish businesses, painting yellow stars on the front doors
of Jewish households and herding the Jews into labour camps under armed guards.
Oh, wait...

The usual suspects have been writing for months now about
fictitious surges in hate crime, to the point where this fable has gained
traction. And now every naïve occasional contributor to the Guardian-led
morality press has his or her story to tell about how they have personally
observed the extremes to which our society has been dragged by the ignorant,
racist, seething Nazis of the Brexit-voting underclasses who have tried to
sabotage a thousand years of civilisation brought to us, of course, by the
French. Without Europe, Great Britain is just an island of wode-wearing savages
to them.

In painting this picture they are assisted by various EU officials,
doing their level best to threaten punishment on our disunited kingdom and
suggesting that negotiations be carried out in French to maximise our
disadvantages. And as Canada concludes that the EU is impossible to deal with
and other countries line up to offer support for the simplicity of trade with
the UK, more and more worms crawl out from the wainscoting of our own mother of
parliaments. They are, it seem, frit.

Both sides have their own narratives, of course. On the
Leave side it is one of subjugation to a foreign and unfriendly power and
subsumption to a future uniculture celebrating nothing so much as uniformity
and conformity and supressing free expression. But even in seeing the EU as an
evil empire, we wish it no great ill, indeed the more prosperous, the more they
will spend with us. You see, we are pragmatic; let’s leave and settle our own
affairs without having to please many masters.

But there is something in the mindset of those
susceptible to socialism that needs to be fed with dread. They cling onto
stories which tell them of the small-mindedness of Brexiteers and how those
feeble intellects must resort to violence and hatred of the other. And they
really believe this guff, as they tell tales round their campfires in fashionable
suburbs where the Union Flag never flies. But it is all bollocks, isn’t it?

They should travel with open minds to the regions lost by
the British long ago. To the former industrial towns which now in parts
resemble the downtrodden wastelands of the third world. They should view with
de-rosed spectacles the migrant ghettoes where integration was never even considered,
let alone attempted. They should speak – and listen – to the deep-rooted local inhabitants
who have found themselves displaced by the ideology of diversity. And they
should check the timelines of these events.

Set course for Little Britain?

Far from there being any sudden change, this creeping
rejection of Britishness and national pride has been deliberately supported for
years. And those leave voters you despise so much have been side-lined for the
best part of half a century, without any meaningful incentive to adopt the EU ‘solution’.
There has been no sudden rise in hate; it’s been simmering away for decades. So
before you decry this imagined explosion of bigotry and loathing and try to blame
it all on Brexit, don’t forget, you started it.